Burning Mountain
Three exposures stitched together with autostitch.
More description tomorrow when I've had a chance to sleep (hmm... I've driven all day today, got home at 11pm-ish, it's now 1:10am and I've posted a picture to flickr rather than crash in bed...)
Burning Mountain is the site of a slow burning underground coal seam. The coal seam is estimated to have been burning for about 5500 years and started about 6 kms from it's present site. Discovered some 150 years ago, it was originally thought to be a smouldering volcano but this theory was quickly debunked by the absence of any igneous rocks in the area. During recorded history the underground fire has moved at a pace of roughly 1 metre per year.
This was quit evident to me as the current vent is roughly 20 metres further away from when I last visited this.
Temperatures of the underground fire can reach up to 1,700ºC and surface rocks can easily be too hot to handle, as such people are not permitted on the vent site itself. Subsidence from the burnt coal seam collapsing can also be an issue and there is plenty of evidence of this having occurred in the past along the walk to the summit.
See where this picture was taken.
View all photos taken: Saturday, 30th December 2006, This photo: 1:08am
you're so flickr addicted ; )
You might be right there Melissa ;-)
I really need to try that autostitch program. I've seen many shots and this program seems to work miracles. I love the slight distortion it creates. Great shot!
It does a fantastic job, most of the time, but doesn't work too well with vertical stitches.
I'm addicted to autostitch , everywhere I go I see stitch opportunities especially using the 14mm ., I did one of my lounge room in a 270 deg view out of three shots.It came up great .
It is indeed pretty cool - I just stitched together 12 shots (2 rows of 6) of a view from a spot in the Blue Mountains, it did an awesome job of it, whereas the Canon PhotoStitch software made a complete balls-up of it.
These are very interesting David. My brother is a mining engineer engaged in coal mine design and rehabilitation who used to work on damping these 'spon[taneous] com[bustion]' areas in the Hunter. If you want to know more I can provide technical details, but you have the above description right methinks ;)
I cheated Rachel and paraphrased the signage at the site :-)
Ooh, nicely stitched! I must try this someday.
You can get some really good panoramas this way, usually I'd crop the shot to remove the black bits but didn't on this one 'cause it was late and I was meant to be going to bed ;-)